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We Ushahidi Ghana are organizing a meet up this saturday to set up an instance to monitor traffic situations in Accra. This is something we planned working on during our last meet up session. Aside that, we will be hacking on the Ushahidi engine as way Â to get interested developers started with the project.

Hot on the heals of Brianâ€™s excellent summary of the 4636 Project development efforts, Iâ€™d like to join in with a little info-graphic of sorts. My goal in putting this together is to present an easy-to-understand â€œbig-pictureâ€ graphic that illustrates how a simple SMS, sent from a Haitian in need, can be transformed into a powerful resource that fuels the crisis response and recovery effort.
A Quick Recap of Project 4636

Hot on the heals of Brianâ€™s excellent summary of the 4636 Project development efforts, Iâ€™d like to join in with a little info-graphic of sorts. My goal in putting this together is to present an easy-to-understand â€œbig-pictureâ€ graphic that illustrates how a simple SMS, sent from a Haitian in need, can be transformed into a powerful resource that fuels the crisis response and recovery effort.
A Quick Recap of Project 4636

If youâ€™ve been reading along on the Ushahidi Blog, you will know that the coordination efforts around the Haitian Earthquake have been nothing short of amazing. The students and volunteers at the Fletcher School Situation Room, the translation volunteers on the Mission 4636 project, the teams and staff of Digicel, Comcel, Energy for Opportunity, FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD, Sahana, Cartika Hosting, the US State Department, almost all branches of the US Military providing humanitarian response and a list of individuals and organizations that could honestly go on forever, have come together in an unprecedented way to work together to help solve problems on the ground and to get information out to any and all interested parties.

If youâ€™ve been reading along on the Ushahidi Blog, you will know that the coordination efforts around the Haitian Earthquake have been nothing short of amazing. The students and volunteers at the Fletcher School Situation Room, the translation volunteers on the Mission 4636 project, the teams and staff of Digicel, Comcel, Energy for Opportunity, FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD, Sahana, Cartika Hosting, the US State Department, almost all branches of the US Military providing humanitarian response and a list of individuals and organizations that could honestly go on forever, have come together in an unprecedented way to work together to help solve problems on the ground and to get information out to any and all interested parties.

Day 25. Volunteers have mapped almost 2,500 reports on Ushahidi-Haiti with about half coming from urgent and actionable text messages. The site was launched just hours after the earthquake. Since then, some 300 volunteers in Boston, DC, Montreal, Geneva, London and Portland have been trained, including some members of the Haitian Diaspora, to continue mapping around the clock. But tracking how responders are using Ushahidi at a tactical level has been a challengeâ€”one that is nicely summarized by Clark Craig with the Marine Corps:

Day 25. Volunteers have mapped almost 2,500 reports on Ushahidi-Haiti with about half coming from urgent and actionable text messages. The site was launched just hours after the earthquake. Since then, some 300 volunteers in Boston, DC, Montreal, Geneva, London and Portland have been trained, including some members of the Haitian Diaspora, to continue mapping around the clock. But tracking how responders are using Ushahidi at a tactical level has been a challengeâ€”one that is nicely summarized by Clark Craig with the Marine Corps:

Sabina Carleson is a senior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health. She has worked in Southern Sudan and three years ago co-founded RESPE, a community-led research and development project in rural northern Haiti under the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL).

Sabina Carleson is a senior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health. She has worked in Southern Sudan and three years ago co-founded RESPE, a community-led research and development project in rural northern Haiti under the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL).

When I called David Kobia to launch the Ushahidi platform two hours after the earthquake, our priority was to map all relevant reports in near real-time and to do so around the clock. This meant monitoring Tweets, Facebook groups, list serves, emails, online news media, blogs, radio and television programs, and now incoming SMS. Thatâ€™s not all, we also needed to turn this information into semi-structured reports and actually geo-tag them. No small task. That is why I immediately set up the Haiti Situation Room at The Fletcher School and why my Fletcher colleagues have since set up similar Situation Rooms in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland.

When I called David Kobia to launch the Ushahidi platform two hours after the earthquake, our priority was to map all relevant reports in near real-time and to do so around the clock. This meant monitoring Tweets, Facebook groups, list serves, emails, online news media, blogs, radio and television programs, and now incoming SMS. Thatâ€™s not all, we also needed to turn this information into semi-structured reports and actually geo-tag them. No small task. That is why I immediately set up the Haiti Situation Room at The Fletcher School and why my Fletcher colleagues have since set up similar Situation Rooms in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland.